Sat, 22 Oct 2011

While we were having dinner, one of the local squirrels came by to look
for her own dinner under the cedar in the front yard, just outside the
window by our dining table.

I remember, when I was young, reading somewhere that squirrels
remember where they bury each nut, so they can return and dig it up
later. Whoever wrote that clearly never spent much time watching
actual squirrels.

I've also read, more recently and in more reputable places, that
squirrels find buried nuts by seeking out likely burial spots then using
their sensitive noses to find the underground nuts.

If so, the sensitive nose thing is overrated. It's actually quite a
bit more work than that description makes it sound.

If you're ever hungry and wanting to dig up a snack from underground,
here's the tried and true, time tested squirrel technique:

Hop over to a place that looks likely.
Bury your nose in the ground, and plow a furrow with said nose
for a few inches.

No nut? Pull your nose out of the ground, hope over to another location
that looks appealing (not one right next to where you just were --
do not by any means use any kind of exhaustive quartering technique),
bury your nose in the ground and repeat.

Every fifth or sixth time, it's permissable to sit up and brush dirt
off your nose before going back to the hunt.

After about twenty minutes of this, our visitor finally did
find something. She triumphantly sat up, brushed herself off, turned
the prize around in her mouth for a while, then ran over to the cedar
to hang upside down for dinner.

Curiously, what she found looked like a live oak acorn -- not
something that's very common here in the suburbs. (Our yard sports
a red oak, but it has tiny acorns which don't interest the squirrels
in the slightest.)

She took five minutes to eat her prize, then returned to the hunt for
another forty minutes. If she found anything else during that time,
I didn't see it, though she might have found something while she was
on the other side of the tree.

Note that I didn't say this was an efficient technique ...
only that it was time tested.